Chief information officers (CIOs) at U.S. government agencies
say they've made progress on several key issues, including IT
security and modernizing their IT infrastructure, but still face
major challenges in security and other areas, according to a survey
released Tuesday.
Government CIOs told interviewers sent by the Information
Technology Association of America (ITAA) they've made progress in
establishing IT security as a priority, expanding security
awareness among staff and, in several cases, appointing a chief
security officer, according to the survey. But IT security and
privacy remain federal CIOs' top concerns, said Paul Wohlleben, a
partner at Grant Thornton LLP, which compiled the survey for
ITAA.
"They want to move to a state where they're taking a view of
their risk ... on an ongoing basis, supported by technology,"
Wohlleben said. "Today, you hear them talking about too much manual
intervention. They want to see more tools emerge that they can hook
onto their networks, onto their applications, that will perform the
monitoring for them."
Federal CIOs want more mature IT security tools, Wohlleben
added.
"We're talking about a vast space they have to protect, and some
very sophisticated perpetrators," he added. "Some of the [security]
technology is just now evolving."
While many CIOs reported making progress with IT security, fewer
said they were moving forward with privacy initiatives, he said.
While some high-profile agencies have addressed privacy issues,
"privacy is a much less mature concern in government" than
security, Wohlleben said.
The 16th annual ITAA survey of U.S. government CIOs included
interviews with 36 CIOs or assistant CIOs and three government
oversight officials between August and December 2005. As in past
years, this year's survey focuses more on general trends than hard
data points.
In addition to security concerns, federal CIOs also identified
as key priorities standardizing and consolidating their IT
infrastructure, improving project management, and examining ways to
use managed services from outside vendors, according to the
survey.
One general theme in the interviews was concern about executing
long-term plans, Wohlleben said. While federal CIOs see themselves
as agents of change in coming years, shifting priorities within
government can make it difficult to carry through long-term IT
plans, he added.
Several government IT projects, including a U.S. Federal Bureau
of Investigation case management project, have not met deadlines in
recent years. The four-year-old FBI Virtual Case File project was
scrapped last March, but the FBI announced in June it had rolled
pieces of the project into a new case management plan.
Many CIOs see execution as a concern especially when trying to
carry out IT modernization plans, Wohlleben said.
"The real issue is executing those plans over a dynamic period
of time," Wohlleben said. "Most of these systems, you don't
implement in a week, you don't implement in a year. They're
multiyear implementations in a political environment where laws are
being changed, in a budgetary environment where budgets are being
changed."
icon.
